THE actress and comedian Julie Walters has sold her memoirs for £1.6m, a record for a showbusiness autobiography in Britain. It beats by £100,000 the figure paid two years ago to the DJ John Peel shortly before his death.

Orion, the publisher that this weekend disclosed the payment to Walters, 56, described the star of films such as Educating Rita as “a national treasure”.

Walters’s advance is less than that paid to Baroness Thatcher or to David Beckham, the England football captain. But it easily exceeds those paid to showbusiness celebrities such as Sharon Osbourne and Jordan, the model.

Their books have been marketed partly on the basis of the subjects’ fame and partly because they tell stories of women achieving success in difficult circumstances.

Orion believes Walters’s early life provides similarly gripping material. “Julie is not just a much-loved and very versatile actress,” said Alan Samson, editorial director of Orion. “She has a human story to tell.”

Walters is expected to emphasise arguments with her mother Mary over her choice of career.

Mary, who emigrated from Ireland to Birmingham where she became a chocolate-packer, was determined her only daughter should become a nurse, against Walters’s desire to be an actress.

The star initially trained as a nurse for a couple of years to please Mary. “My mother hated me abandoning it,” said Walters, whose latest film Wah-Wah, a semi-biographical account of the early life of the actor Richard E Grant, opened this weekend.

“I had to get my two brothers and father to stand between me and her when I gave in my notice. She then said if I took up acting I’d be in the gutter by the time I was 20.”

Mary was so piqued by her daughter’s choice of career that she avoided her performances. After her death in 1989, however, Walters found a box of newspaper cuttings, charting her successes, in her mother’s house.

Her memoirs will also describe the role played by alcohol in her early years in acting. While alcohol never dominated her life or became a health problem, Walters will admit that drink led to her sometimes loudmouthed reputation.

She met her future husband Grant Roffey, eight years her junior, in a wine-bar in 1986, propositioning him with the words: “Do you want to come home with me and have my babies?” They have one daughter, Maisie, who was diagnosed with leukaemia when she was only two. She was ill for three years — a period when Walters all but gave up work. After Maisie was born she also gave up drink.

“It was a very boozy time for all of us,” said Willy Russell, who wrote the play Educating Rita, first staged at the Liverpool Everyman theatre.

Walters worked there in the 1970s with future stars such as Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite and Matthew Kelly. She became a household name in the early 1980s appearing with Victoria Wood in BBC television comedy shows. She is still remembered as Mrs Overall in the Acorn Antiques sketches.

Her first big cinema role was in the film of Educating Rita with Michael Caine in 1983.

Walters has won five Baftas, two Oscar nominations — with Educating Rita and Billy Elliot — and one Olivier award for her role on the London stage in 2001 in All My Sons.

In recent years Walters has taken on serious dramatic roles in television while maintaining a successful film career with movies such as Harry Potter and Calendar Girls.

Her memoirs are due to be published in 2008.

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